In Vogue’s Gallery, Sarah Lewis highlights the power and beauty in Deborah Willis’s photographs.
Lewis selected these 14 striking images with the theme “travel, race, and beauty” in mind, timed to the February publication of Willis’s latest book, Beautiful. “I chose Deb Willis for Vogue’s Gallery because the photographs in her forthcoming monograph are a discovery,” says Lewis, who grew up with Willis’s books on Harlem Renaissance leader James VanDerZee and other legendary black photographers. “I was stunned that she had created these images alongside her MacArthur-winning writings. Even her closest friends didn’t realize that she had been photographing so extensively over the years while she produced her widely influential scholarship on other people’s pictures.”
Willis has been observing and thinking about beauty throughout her distinguished teaching career—she’s currently professor and chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. As she writes in Beautiful, she is interested in the ways it is “posed, constructed, imagined, reviewed, critiqued, and contested in art, the media, and everyday culture.” She has given a platform to countless African-American artists with probing photographic exhibitions for more than 20 years at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Read entire article and view photos at Vogue.com.